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Our colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder Media and Climate Change Observatory (MECCO) have spotlighted a long-time high in newspaper reporting about climate change – a trend we can substantiate with our own data on other news outlets. In September, media attention to climate change and global warming was at its highest level globally in nearly a decade.

In an article for the German journal “Media Perspektiven”, we analysed our survey data from 2015 and 2018, focusing on media use and evaluation of the coverage related to the topic of climate change and climate politics. The article is available here (open access, German only).

While Donald Trump was responsible for most peaks in the Twitter debate on climate change in recent years, 2018 was different: a scientific report trumped Trump in triggering the most intensive Twitter debate related to climate change.

As in previous years, we take a look at the Twitter data our Online Media Monitor (OMM) has gathered over the course of 2018, and describe the events that triggered tweets about climate change, as well as the most important domains that were linked to and the most active accounts in our sample.

Recent weeks have not only brought about record-breaking temperatures, but also a rise in climate coverage, as clearly shown by our Online Media Monitor (OMM) on Climate Change Coverage around the world [1]. But are higher-than-usual temperatures really the main trigger of climate change reporting? We had a closer look at the case of Germany: Continue reading Is German Climate Coverage driven by extreme temperatures? Partly.

Three publications’ coverage relating to COP212 were examined from yesterday: CBC, The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail.

CBC

On the main page of Canada’s national public broadcaster’s website, several climate stories featured prominently. One article wrote hopefully of an impending climate deal as the conference draws to a close. Some of the apparent 10-15 sticking points on such a deal are:

Whether a fund should be established to help compensate low-lying countries for loss and damage related to climate change.

What temperature should be included as the maximum warming the world should reach: 1.5 C or 2 C or somewhere in between.

How to review and improve national goals for reducing emissions in the future.

What is often forgotten in the public discourse on climate change, however, is how regular people around the world make sense of what’s going on in Paris. The teenager in Newark, the student in Madrid or the businesswoman in Pune. It has often times been reiterated that climate change affects every one of us. In this analysis I will shed some light into how climate change is discussed on the “front page of the internet”: Reddit.

This picture originally appeared on Vocativ.com in a story about how Reddit’s science subreddit would no longer allow climate denial posts. Click picture to follow link

Anyone with a passing interest in climate change will know how intractably difficult international negotiations have proved in the past, reaching a low-point at Copenhagen.

Whatever the outcome this week in Paris, the preponderance of ‘square brackets’ in the latest draft document (signifying those issues still to be resolved) indicates that the task remains troublesome. While a scientific consensus on the basics of climate change has been established, a political consensus has been less forthcoming1,2. One reason for this is that climate change is not a uniquely scientific issue, but a public issue involving science3. We need to explore the public meanings of climate change, and allow these meanings to inform the debate around political responses to climate change. I suggest that one way to scratch the surface of such meanings is through the vibrant use of Twitter around the COP21 event4.

Before dealing with environmental news reporting academically, I was involved in the environmental movement personally, since back in the 90s.

I was, for instance, at the World Social Forum which took place during the now sadly famous G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001. I was volunteering as a translator and spent several days actively participating. While there, I had the chance to attend and listen to workshops hosting prominent figures of the so called anti-globalisation movement. Within the movement, at that time, concepts, issues and stakeholders of the sustainability question were defined for an increasingly broad public – an internet-connected public. The discussion was especially relevant for a development-critical, possibly de-growth-oriented perspective. The international and Italian media coverage of that summit in particular, and the discrepancy with my own experience of the events that took place, was one of my journalistic biggest lessons so far.